A Creatrix Praxis Space for Liberation

(Photo by iStock/sarayut)  

“The People remembered the truth of their Being, that they are The People who fly! And they rose up in the air … spiraling up and up in counterclockwise rings shouting all the while. They rode those hot breezes like currents, singin’ and wingin’ their way to Freedom Land!”—excerpt from FREEDOM LAND’s Origin Folqtellin, written by ChE

“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it is time to try the impossible.”—Sun Ra

“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

We are FREEDOM LAND, and we host a Creatrix Praxis Space led by and for queer, trans, gender-nonconforming, two-spirit+ Black and Indigenous peoples-of-color (QTGNC2-S+ BIPOC) movement artists, creative conjurers, worldbuilders, and makers of all levels of experience. This space holds a circle for those seeking the safe harbor of accompaniment, accountability, and shared practice rooted in the culturally resonant creative pedagogies of our ancestors.

Why

In order to build worlds beyond the normative status quo of systemic colonial violence, we need to be able to imagine something more liberatory. And yet far too often, imagination, dreaming, and creative play are undervalued or left out altogether in strategic planning and organizing. When we cultivate our faculties of radical imagination, we are cultivating our power to shape change.

Transformation is a continuous journey that takes moment-by-moment courage to build intimacy with the unseen. This is the calling of any liberatory medicine path.

It can be intimidating to commit to a ritual of consistent creative/artistic practice and conjure. Yet as QTGNC2-S+ BIPOC, we have everything we need to do so. Our ancestors have survived innumerable apocalypses of attempted genocides, colonization, pandemics, and enslavement. Our creation cosmologies and griot folkways are alive with sacred instructions that lay pathways to interdependent freedom. These inherited technologies of dreaming and visioning beyond seemingly impossible circumstances allow us to make a way out of no way. From this ancestral worldview, imagination becomes prophecy.

Regardless of our level of experience as creatrices, we all need and deserve accompaniment as we lean into the vulnerability required in “be[ing] willing to be transformed in service of the work” (Mary Hooks, “The Mandate: A Call and Response from Black Lives Matter Atlanta,” 2016). Transformation is a continuous journey that takes moment-by-moment courage to build intimacy with the unseen—engaging the kindred of past | present | future to heal transgenerational wounds, and (re)shape reality with our chosen medium. This is the calling of any liberatory medicine path. This is the calling of the creatrix.

What

Creatrix Praxis Space is a monthly circle gathering that emerges and flows from what and who is present. Consistent components of our time include:

• An opening circle that offers:
  • Afro-Indigenous rituals and somatic practices for remembering histories of land, place, and ancestors.
  • Inspiration—such as a reading, listening, artistic or embodied practice that cultivates the Black radical imagination and teaches cultural organizing strategies.

• Time for creative coworking, offering accompaniment in our world-building practice(s).
• Time for culturally affirming critique, offering call-and-response reflection and feedback on what has been created.
• A closing circle woven with Freedom singing, polyrhythm, and gratitude practices that celebrate keeping our commitment to creative praxis and cultivating kinship along the way.

How

For this praxis series, we evoke the world-building methodologies and rituals of The Creatrix—our gender-expansive Black+Indigenous Feminist Mothxrs of Creation. Emerging from this lineage, our applied transdisciplinary intersectional justice framework, Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Praxis, reminds us that in these bodies—art, healing, and ritual resistance are all one. This approach centers transmuting the wounds of internalized oppression and ongoing colonial violence through:

• process-based participatory facilitation,
• expressive arts therapeutic techniques,
• trauma-informed somatics,
• mindfulness/contemplative praxis,
• studying cultural organizing strategies,
• and cultivating relationships with land and beyond-human relatives.

Participants challenge maladaptive habits of self-sabotage, avoidance, and isolation by immersing in a liberatory praxis space that develops cultural organizing excellence, nourishes the creative spirit, and builds trust in an aligned supportive community, as we dare to shape freedom dreams for future generations.

Read more stories by ChE.